This blog will post detailed news items about GLBT issues. Some of the issues include the "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and gay marriage. Please note that my main website is DOASKDOTELL.COM (link on my Profile).

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About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Monday, January 21, 2013

Army denies same-sex couple right to attend retreat; many problems because of DOMA

The New York Times has a story by Rachel L. Swarns, Sunday
January 20, 2013, “Military rules leave gay spouses in the cold”, link (website url) here.

Despite the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in 2011,
same-sex military couples, legally married in some states (which now can
include Maryland) are denied most spousal benefits by military rules, which the
government says are in some part predicated on the Defense of Marriage Act, or
DOMA, now under constitutional challenge.
The Marine Corps has ironically been a little more progressive than the
other services. (Once, on an Army Basic bivouac
in 1968, I said, “The Marines are tougher than the Army!)

Same-sex military couples cannot get discounted housing or
other consumer benefits.

But the most galling part of the story concerned a military
family retreat at Fort Bragg, NC (I think that meant only one member of a
couple was in the Army). A lesbian was
told to leave a retreat my a military chaplain after she was told that her
presence made the heterosexuals, pondering how to keep the intimacies of their
marriages going, “comfortable” and distracted.

That hits the hammer of the “old chestnut” debates on both
the “gays in the military” and gay marriage debates – that others are
distracted and lose cohesion and focus. It’s
particularly disturbing now in the marriage issue because it insinuates that
straight couples may not be able to maintain long-term conjugal intimacy, when
under stress, if they believe that same-sex couples can do the same.

This problem ought to change, given the Commander-in-Chief's bold inaugural speech today.

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